My New Favorite Buttermilk Biscuits

Can you believe this weather?  I'm glad these were baked last week, because it may be too hot to turn on the oven this week.  We've had highs in the 70s, and Thursday is supposed to be 83.  Beach, here I come!  And yet, Joe and I are such fans of these biscuits, we may turn on the oven just for them.  I've tried various biscuit recipes before, but these have everything I want.  You can take them the savory route with cheese or ham, or the sweet route with jam -- peach ginger here.  But they're so good, I like them best without any add-ons.

The best part is how light and fluffy they are.  I'm not sure whether to credit the recipe or the use of pastry flour -- I'm going to say it's the two combined.  The recipe calls for all-purpose flour, but I used pastry flour (rather, King Arthur's Perfect Pastry Blend, which falls somewhere between all-purpose and pastry flours) to make them extra tender.  They didn't come out like the perfect hockey puck shapes in the cookbook photo, but I realized hockey puck shapes were overrated when I bit into flaky, soft, buttery layers.

Homemade Fried Chicken

Sometimes you just get the craving for fried chicken, and not the drive-through kind. After doing some reading on the subject matter, I threw together a simple enough flour mixture, though I admit there was a second try for some tweaking. Serve it with some mashed potatoes or biscuits, and one obligatory healthy side, and you're in heaven.

One other note: a thermometer is necessary. It takes longer than you'd think to get the oil up to temperature, and the oil needs to be hot enough and the chicken cooked long enough to get the perfect browning outside and doneness inside. A candy thermometer works great for this. I also have a deep fryer, but I find I like my enameled cast iron dutch oven better.

• About 9 chicken thighs, wings, and drumsticks
  
• 1 cup buttermilk or 1 egg plus 1 cup milk
  
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
  
• 1 tbs baking powder
  
• 1 tsp salt
  
• 1 tsp black pepper
  
• ½ tsp ground cayenne pepper
  
• Enough oil to fill half of a large dutch oven

1. Start heating your oil to 360º (the temperature will drop to about 350º when you add the chicken, which is where you want to keep the temp). It may take more than 10 minutes to heat up.
2. Trim the skin off the drumsticks and thighs, if you'd like. Place all the chicken in a bowl filled with the buttermilk, or the egg and milk. In a shallow bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, salt, and peppers. Dredge the chicken pieces through the flour mixture and set aside.
3. When the oil comes to temperature, add your chicken pieces. Don't overcrowd the pot or they won't cook evenly; 4-5 pieces at a time is best. Cook the chicken for about 13 minutes, turning the pieces halfway through the cooking time with a handheld brass strainer like the one in the picture. The chicken should be about the color in the photo. Drain the chicken on paper towels and pat dry, and serve.

Back to Baking: Buttermilk Biscuits

So the weather cooled down a bit today, and I was eager to use my oven again. I've been grilling outside and using my ice cream maker to make more frozen yogurt, but avoiding baking because the heat just gets unbearable. This recipe is from Rose Levy Berenbaum, and I used the more reliable weight measurements.

Weight	Volume	Ingredients
3 oz	6 tbs	cold, unsalted butter
6.5 oz	1 1/4 cups	Bleached all-purpose flour
2.3 oz	2/3 cup	Cake flour
.5 oz	1 tbs	Baking powder
	1 tsp	Salt
1.3 oz	3 tbs	Sugar
1.3 oz		2 Large eggs, hard-cooked, yolks only
6.3 oz	3/4 cup	Buttermilk or heavy cream (I used buttermilk)

You'll need a baking sheet plus a cushioned baking sheet OR 2 baking sheets, one on top of the other, lined with Silpat or parchment. You'll also need a baking stone (like a pizza stone) or a baking sheet.

Cut the butter and chill it. Place the oven rack at the middle level and put the stone or baking sheet on it. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. If White Lily self-rising flour is sold in your area, you can use 10 oz OR 2 cups of that, and omit the flours, baking powder, and salt in the chart above. Add the butter, and use your fingertips to press it into the flour until you get pieces that resemble coarse meal. Press the egg yolk through a fine strainer into the flour mixture, and whisk to distribute them evenly. Stir in the buttermilk, just until the flour is moistened and the dough starts to come together. Knead it on a lightly floured counter, and roll it 3/4 inch thick.

Dip a 2 1/2-inch round biscuit cutter or cookie cutter into a dish of flour before each cut (helps it not stick) and cut through the dough, lifting without twisting for maximum rise. Knead any leftover dough scraps and roll them out, repeating the process until you've used them all up. Place them an inch apart.

Place your baking sheet(s) on the hot baking stone or baking sheet, raise the temperature to 400 degrees, and bake for 5 minutes. Then lower the temperature to 375 degrees and bake 10 to 15 minutes more or until golden (an instant-read thermometer inserted in the center should say 200 degrees). The recipe yielded 12 biscuits for me.

I have to confess I used my food processor to make the dough up to this point, instead of a pastry cutter or mushing anything by hand. It's just faster, and I whizzed the hard-boiled yolks in the food processor, too. Don't they look like lemon zest?


The recipe doesn't call for it, but I snipped in some chives from my herb box for half the biscuits. Why not?

For the other half, I mixed together a teaspoon of paprika with a dash of cayenne pepper, and kneaded some of that mixture into the dough, and use the remainder of the mixture to sprinkle on the tops.


It helps to cut your biscuits real close to each other, to minimize the necessity of re-rolling the dough.